Christ Died For Us

I've been thinking of the weight of the words we've been saying and singing. They feel very heavy to me. And then there's intermixed in these heavy things about our sins or our struggles, the things we've done to cause Jesus pain and death. There's interspersed in there hope and love and the mercy of God. And it's... It's a strange thing, but I would say to you about that, to the extent that you've recognized those things as we've been worshiping this evening, that that is the place that Christians live their whole lives if they're attentive to their sins. It's very easy. There's lots of things we could do with our sins, and we'll get to our text in just a second. But many of us could take our sins and we could just ignore them. If someone were to come to us at the end of the day and say, how did you sin today?

I think many of us would say, I'm not sure. Or if we said, this is how I sinned, we may have one or two things. We may have said, well, I got angry while I was driving. You know, the guy screwed up at the roundabout. Or something, you know, on the scale of things, small and probably pretty surface level in terms of our understanding of our sins. And some of us would think, what's the big deal about sin? We don't do a whole lot of that. And I'd say, no, we do, but we're blinded to it. while others of us might be burdened with the weight of our sins. Maybe it's not the sin we committed today or this week. Maybe it's a sin that we committed two years ago. Maybe it's a sin we committed five years ago or 20 years ago. And when we think of our sins, that's what pops up in our mind. I did that. And it's marked in our minds as this awful thing. With either one of those approaches or others, they fall short of...

of where we should come to be as Christians. They come short of what we should understand about the gospel and about Jesus Christ. And so this evening, we've gathered together to remember the death of Jesus Christ. And there's no way for us to remember the death of Jesus Christ unless we remember why he had to die. Now, it's easy to take that message and sort of use it as a whip or a bat to just make you feel bad. I could do that, and we could all go away just feeling about this big. And there is a sense in which we should go away feeling about this big, but that shouldn't be all that we recognize. But we do have to recognize our own failures, what we've done to contribute to the wrath of God that was poured out on His Son, Jesus Christ. And so our text this evening is Romans 5, verses 6-8.

Now some of you who are here regularly, you may not know the address, but I suspect when we read it, you'll recognize it as a verse that we use often as an assurance of pardon. One of these texts that God gives us in his mercy to remind us of his kindness to sinners. And yet even in his kindness, he doesn't pass over our failures or our sins or why we need his grace. He acknowledges it and then says, you've done all this. And my love. is demonstrated in my son coming into the world to save people who do things like that. And so that's what this passage demonstrates, the love of God for sinners. It teaches us that Jesus came to die for the worst kind of people, not little sinners, but big ones. And so my hope this evening is that God will use this time to reveal to us our need of Jesus Christ. Would you please stand as we read the word of the Lord from Romans 5, verses 6 to 8. This is the word of the Lord, and it is eternally true.

At the right time, Christ died for the ungodly. For one will hardly die for a righteous man, though perhaps for the good man someone would dare even to die. But God demonstrates his own love toward us, and that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. So there's a couple of words in this passage that describe us, that Paul, the Holy Spirit, gives to describe you and me. And one of them is right at the beginning. He says, for while we were still helpless, while we were helpless. To be helpless means to be without strength, unable to provide for yourselves. Seeing a thing you need or desire and having no ability to get it. To go, that's what I want, but I can't have it because I don't have the strength or the ability to acquire it for me. We could think of the ends of life.

young, young children, babies, infants, they're helpless. They're unable to do anything for themselves. They need a lot of attentiveness, a lot of care, a lot of provision because they can't do it for themselves. Or you can come to the other end of life. As people are nearing the end and as they're dying and you realize that they're losing their abilities again. They're losing their strength. Their helplessness is becoming more apparent to them. and to those around them that love them. But for all the time in between, our infancy and the end of our life, we're still helpless. You, wherever you are, if you're young, maybe you're two or three years old, and you think, I'm getting stronger. And in some ways that's true, and yet you're helpless. And you who are in the prime of life, and you've just gotten married, and you've got all these ambitions, and all these desires, and all these expectations, And you have strength and your body works and it doesn't hurt and you sleep well and you can eat whatever you want and you don't worry about these sorts of things yet. You're helpless. And those of us who are a little older but yet not knocking on death's door, who have maturity and who have wisdom, who may not move as fast as our younger counterparts but move with more purpose and more intention and are more productive.

and know when it's worthwhile to just keep our mouths shut or to measure twice and cut once. We are helpless. Now, it's one thing for me to say that we're helpless, but I want to put the question to you now. Do you feel helpless? Or maybe a better question is, when you do feel helpless, how do you respond to it? I think our natural response to it is to be frustrated, to be angry. You know little babies when they can't, maybe they're not newborns, but they reach and they can't get the thing. What do they do? They cry. They point. And some sibling comes and gets it for them. Or mom runs over, dad runs over. Here you go, honey. They get frustrated when they can't have the things they want. And are we any different?

When we're older and stronger and bigger, are we any different? Don't we get frustrated when there's something we want and we can't have it? We think we deserve it, but we can't lay our hands on it. Now, we may not cry out with our mouths the way a baby does. You know, the babies in some sense have a leg up on us. They haven't cultivated the sort of pride that we do in that we despise help. If a baby reaches for something and can't get it and they squawk about it and then you hand it to them, they smile. But how many of us, when we know that we're weak, when we know that we're helpless, when we know that we can't get the things we want, help's offered to us, we say, no, I'll do that myself. However long it takes and however hard it is and however much suffering for me and those around me it entails, I won't have help. I will do it myself. And that's nothing more than a denial and a repudiation of what the Bible tells us we are, which is helpless.

unable to get for ourselves the things we need. Now, Paul's not talking about this in terms of your ability to get food or to get water or to live a life in this world. But when we do run up against our helplessness, even in those areas, we get frustrated. We get frustrated with one another's helplessness. Somebody else needs something. They're too weak and unable to get it for themselves. And it frustrates you. You mothers, you young mothers, how many times have you been frustrated at your child for their helplessness? They can't do it themselves. Maybe you lean over and you say, honey, go help the baby. And your husband's cried out. We despise that helplessness in ourselves and in everyone around us. It's like a unison. It's this resounding hatred of weakness and helplessness.

And it's easy to get this way in our day and in our age because no one is, you know, whenever there's helplessness or weakness, we hide that and put it away. We're not exposed to it. Now, am I saying that being helpless is a good thing? No, I'm not. Helplessness, you know, if an infant is helpless and we say, oh, it's good that they're weak and they're incapable of caring for themselves, we say that's a good thing and we say, no. What will happen to them if someone else doesn't step in and care for them? they'll die. They need to be cared for. And yet we take our helplessness and we exacerbate it. We make it worse through our denials and our refusal to accept help. Oftentimes in counseling or in meeting with people, when I sense that there's a pushback, I'm saying, well, I think you should, and they start pushing back, well, I don't think you know what you're talking about. I'll say, okay, how is your plan going? It's your problem.

You ask me, I'm your pastor, what do I think about whatever it is? You've been trying your plan. You're telling me my plan's wrong. How's your plan work? Now why would I say that to somebody? It's not too sophisticated. It's to put them back on their heels and to say, you don't know as much as you think you know. You need help and you're refusing it and you shouldn't do that. And so the scripture describes us as helpless. And then it goes on and says, at the right time, Christ died for the ungodly. And so when you see ungodly, you should hear that that's another description of us. First we were helpless and now we're ungodly. And so what he's doing is saying, okay, there's helplessness and then there's, this is not a neutral or a benign sort of helplessness. In the sense that if a baby's unable to pick their head up, feed themselves or whatever, that's not a bad sort of helplessness. It's just a fact. But our helplessness is

an ungodly sort of helplessness it's not a neutral morally neutral helplessness it's a it's a morally destructive sort of helplessness it's one that causes harm and incurs a debt with god and so this verse is as we start out it says it says for while we were still helpless at the right time christ died for the ungodly and so if we were to rephrase this or put it into our own words we would say when we were rebellious in our and dug in in our opposition to God, that's when his son died for us. That's the right time, says Scripture. Now in this passage, the greater context of Romans 5 is Paul's talking about how we are justified. And I don't want to go into a long discussion of what justification is and what that means. But in the Christian life, you have three major things that happen.

Two of them happen at a particular point in time and then there's a bunch of, the other one happens in the middle. So if you were to think of having a bookshelf with a row of books on it and two bookends, you know, things that hold the books together, at one end of the shelf, that first bookend is what we would call justification. And that's what Paul's talking about here. He's saying there's an event when God justifies us. And what that means is that he looks on us And all of our sins and all the things that we've done and all of the hell that we deserve. And he says, my son, Jesus, paid that debt for you. And you get his righteousness. So when God looks at us after that point, he doesn't see our sins anymore. He sees his son's perfect obedience. And so we might like to contribute something good to that equation.

But here Paul says we have nothing to contribute because our ungodliness, our helplessness prevents us from being able to give anything good to God. And so that happens at the beginning of our Christian life. Sometimes we're aware of that, like Paul was on the road to Damascus. It was very clear to him when God got a hold of him and changed him. That's not the case for everybody. But after that point, We get into the books that are on the shelf, and that's what the Scripture calls our sanctification. And so you can think of that as the story of your life as it's unfolding, as God's writing it. It's written in those books up there. And during that time, during our lives, God's, through that story, making us more like Jesus. He's changing us. He's growing us. We're maturing. This is the life of a Christian. And then you get to the bookend at the other end, and that's glorification.

That is when we die and whatever remaining sin is left in us, it's purged of us and it's gone. And now we don't have sin anymore. So this is our Christian life. And so when Paul's speaking here, he's talking about justification. He's not talking about the Christian life. And so when I'm saying to you, we're helpless and we're ungodly, what I mean is before we come to Christ, this is our condition. And there is a remnant of that reality left in us in the books of our life. And those remnants are what God's working out of us as we live. And so this verse teaches us, in terms of that bookshelf, before we have our holy or Christians or anything, at that time, when we were rebellious sinners, that was the right time for Jesus to die. We might like to think that God looked out at us and saw something good in us.

as opposed to our neighbor, and preferred us over them, that he looked out and thought, well, that woman's got a little bit of faithfulness in there. She's not quite as bad as the one next door. You ever look around at your friends and your neighbors, your siblings, and think, I'm glad I'm not like them. I'm glad I don't struggle like that. I'm glad I don't speak to, you know, glad I know how to keep my mouth shut. That's just us wanting to hold on to something we can offer to God and say, look, here's a good thing. Here's a good thing in me. But the Bible says, From the beginning, we were born helpless, ungodly, rebels, enemies of God, dead in our sins. And so if we're going to think of Jesus' death, we have to locate it in time. And the time where we locate Jesus' death in our lives is while we were not Christians, while we were not friends of God, while we were his enemies. It was at that time that his son died for us.

That may not make sense to us. And so Paul goes in in the next couple of verses and he gives us these examples. He says, For one will hardly die for a righteous man, though perhaps for a good man someone would dare even to die. And it's a really strange verse. What's that mean? What's it mean? I've puzzled over this for years, wondering, I don't know quite what that means. But what Paul's doing here is he's saying, you know, there's a circumstance where there's a righteous man. Let's just thought experiment, right? There's a righteous man, a good man, a godly man. If we could look at him and we could look up to him and we say, that's a good man, I might, we might find one in a million who would be willing to die for that guy so that he didn't have to die for his own sins. There may be someone on the earth who would die for a righteous man. It's not a common thing. It's not an easy thing. It's not a small thing.

But you might find somebody, perhaps for a good man, someone would dare even to die. So they say, you know, I'll die in his place. He's a good man. Why? Because we probably look at him and say, well, I think he's better than me and I'd like to see him continue on. But there's almost no one who would die even for a righteous man, even for a good man. Which one of us would look at, if you could think of someone that you respect and admire and you say that he or she. they're the real deal. If you had to give your life for them, what this scripture teaches us is, you wouldn't do it. I wouldn't do it. And they wouldn't do it for you. And he's getting at this idea that we don't give our lives, even for the best of men, we would not sacrifice our own lives. As good as they could be, we wouldn't give our lives for them. And what he's creating is a comparison between those good men, those righteous men, and us, those ungodly sinners.

And he says, you could find the best man on the planet and hardly anyone would give their life for him. That's not who you are. That's not what you're like. You're this helpless rebel who digs in your heels and fights against God and fights against the help that he provides. And almost nobody would die for the good man who's nothing like you. Now, will anyone die for you? This is what Paul's driving at. And of course, we're sitting here thinking, well, no. If no one would die for a good man, who's going to die for this miserable person? And so he makes that comparison so that we see what it means for his son to die. Because that's what this next verse comes into. He says, no one would die for a good man, not even for a righteous man. But God demonstrates his own love toward us. Who is us? Helpless sinners, ungodly. In other passages, enemies of Christ.

But God demonstrates his own love toward us, which isn't meant to give us these warm, like, fuzzies and these good feelings about, you know, I'm a good guy. He said, no, no, no, you're not a good guy. You're not a good woman. Your sins are not small. Your sins are not insignificant. God doesn't look at them and go, oh, that's okay, we'll just go on through. No, no. Helpless, ungodly sinners. Rebels and enemies of Christ. God demonstrates his love toward us, those people, and that while we were still like that, Christ died for us. Now those are amazing words. Those are amazing words. I think we miss those words and that's why we don't, it's like in America in our day, we're afraid of sin. And we're not afraid of it in the sense that we're afraid to do it. That's not true. But we're afraid to acknowledge it. We can't come and say, I'm a sinner.

This is what I did. We come to church and we're all cleaned up and nice and smiles and hair. We're not sinners. No one could know we're sinners. But it creates these miserable realities in our lives where you have no fellowship with anybody. Even in the church. I could go on and on and talk about people outside the church, but here we are. We're in the church, so why don't we talk about ourselves? It ruins our fellowship with one another because we can't maintain the lie. If we get too close. And so the only people who know who we really are are the people who live in our house. And the reason we don't let anybody come into our house is because they might see what's going on. And why do we do all that? It's because we won't admit that we're sinners. We think if I admit that I'm a sinner, if I say this is who I am and this is what I've done, we think then now there's no hope. No one will know what to do with me.

And at the top of not knowing what to do is we think no one will love me. No one will understand. No one will have mercy. No one will stay with me. And I can't have that, so I lie. I hide. I wither away on the inside. Whatever I present to the outside. You guys know what influencers are on social media? I could ask you what you think they are, but I'll tell you what they actually are. They're there to make you jealous. They're there to lie to you and make you jealous, and Satan put them there, if I could be so bold as to say. And so I was watching one of these guys, because I'm not immune to wanting to admire someone else's life. And so the guy I was watching, he's a woodworker, and he just sold his house, and they're moving off the grid, and they're going to be, and I don't admire that part.

But he made a video and he says, here's why we're moving. Here's why we sold our house. He's a really, really, really good woodworker. Makes beautiful things. And he says, here's the reality. You guys look around and you go, how can you give all this stuff up? And what he said, honest truth. He said, this is all a lie. The truth is, I don't make any money doing what I'm doing and we're in debt up to our eyeballs. And the only way we could get out of it was to sell our house and move out to the woods. and I could build my family a house. And I've always wanted to do that anyway. And it was so refreshing that he was honest. Finally, for a moment, he says, we all lie to you. We all tell you this is the way to live your life, and we're lying to you. And we're racking up tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt to maintain the lie. And it was so refreshing for him to say, we've been lying to you. Now, I think he'll keep making the videos, and he'll keep perpetuating the lie.

But that shouldn't be our ask. We shouldn't aim to be like that as Christians. I'm going to come to church and I'm going to try to put out a lie. And that lie is, when it's all said and done, is simply, I'm not a sinner. And if I am, I'm not a very bad one. And if I am a really bad one, those sins were in the past. How many times, are you okay? Are you struggling? Well, I was struggling. I did go through a hard time. There was this really bad thing. I used to. It's always in the past, you know. And I'm afraid that we do all that stuff simply because we don't understand that, one, God doesn't believe your lies. He's not put off by them. He actually understands how bad you are better than you. Better than you do. And when you tell yourself, well, I just, I meant well and I didn't do it and I'm getting better and I'm trying or I'm tired or I'm hungry, whatever, he sees it perfectly clearly and perfectly accurate.

And he knows the truth. Those of you who have kids, have you ever caught your kids doing something they shouldn't do and then you watch the, what are you doing? And you watch and they're trying to come up with the story. Why'd you do that? Uh, cause, uh. And this is our God looking at us with even better understanding than we have of our children. And when you look at your children, you're just like, come on. You know, I know you had cookies. There's chocolate all over. Just say, I stole a cookie. Why'd you steal a cookie? Because I like cookies. And you told me I couldn't have one. So I waited until you went around the corner and then I thought, I'd go get one. And now I'm caught. And that's where we're at. Now if you were a parent and your kid said that to you, you might go, thank you for being honest.

And there may be some consequence. That's not the end of the transaction, but at least it's an honest one. At least it's honest. At least we can deal with that. We as Christians ought to be honest. And the thing we have to be honest about is that we're sinners. And that when we become Christians, we don't stop being sinners. Jesus' death and his resurrection does break the power of sin. Those who are... outside of Christ, those who are not Christians, they are still helpless. They are still unable to do good. They're unable to obey God. They don't have the ability to do it any more than an infant has the ability to get up and walk. They cannot do it. But Jesus' death and his resurrection broke that power over us, that slavery, that bondage.

that we were in. And what's a shame is that too often, we're like the people of Israel getting called out of Egypt. We would rather go back to the slavery, back to the helplessness, back to the rebellion. Satan does know that. God knows that. And Satan will use that to discourage you, to whisper lies into your ears about your unworthiness. I'll tell you, if someone says you're a sinner, if Satan whispers in your ear, You're an awful person. You shouldn't bat an eye. You should say, I know. I know. And the people closest to me know too. We all know. It's the truth. I'm a sinner. I'm a Christian. And I'm still a sinner. And God's still purging that wickedness out of me. And I'm thankful for the work He's done in me. And I look forward to the work that He'll continue to do in me, realizing that I will still sin.

And that when I die, I will still have need of his mercy to purge out the rest of it that didn't come out in this life. And he will do it. But you can only say those things if you're willing to first admit, I'm this kind of sinner. And even when I become a Christian, I still have these kind of inclinations. And the sweet thing is that God knows that and he's not ashamed to call you his sons or his daughters, knowing that that's the kind of person you are and that's the kind of stuff you do. In John 15, Jesus is teaching his disciples and he's calling them to love one another. And he gives himself as an example. And this is what he tells them to do. He says, greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends. When you think of the death of Jesus, you should think of a willing laying down of his life. Laying it down, knowing you better than you will ever know yourself.

willingly laying it down before he called you or redeemed you or gave you any interest in his death. That's the love of God as demonstrated to us through the death of Christ. You're a terrible sinner. If you're a Christian, you sin in awful ways. And you know what? You're going to sin in awful ways in the future too. Terrible sorts of things, some of us. And we just want to recoil from it and say, no, no. And in a sense in which that's right, we ought to say, Lord, may it never be. Not for our sakes, but for his glory's sake. But John tells us in his epistle, if we sin, we have an advocate with the Father. Jesus' death was for your sins. Not just the little ones. Not just the ones you're willing to cop to. Not just the ones that you can keep hidden. All of them. All of them. That person.

that you've seen and you're scared of, it's worse than that. And that's the man, that's the woman that Jesus came to save. So in the next day, until you come back to church and we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus, his victory over the grave, you should think about what kind of sinner you are. If you don't know, ask someone who lives with you. Remember I said at the beginning, ask yourself, what were your sins today? And we might say, I don't know. You know who does know? Those people you live with. They know. They could tell you. They might not want to because they love you and they don't want to hurt your feelings. But tell them, say, it's okay if you be honest. I'm willing for you to be honest. Because the Bible says that God loves people like you're about to describe. And he did it by sending his son. If you'll do that, then when you gather to worship this Sunday and all the Sundays after it, you'll have joy. You'll have real joy. And that joy will be built on the reality that you know what kind of sinner you are.

And you're willing for other people to know it because God already does. And you ask for help from his people, from his spirit, from your family. Help me. I want to be more like Jesus. I want to love other people the way he's loved me. Help me. Let's pray.